Parameter Advising For Multiple Sequence Alignment

This book develops a new approach called parameter advising for finding a parameter setting for a sequence aligner that yields a quality alignment of a given set of input sequences. In this framework, a parameter advisor is a procedure that automatically chooses a parameter setting for the input, and has two main ingredients: (a) the set of parameter choices considered by the advisor, and (b) an estimator of alignment accuracy used to rank alignments produced by the aligner. On coupling a parameter advisor with an aligner, once the advisor is trained in a learning phase, the user simply inputs sequences to align, and receives an output alignment from the aligner, where the advisor has automatically selected the parameter setting. The chapters first lay out the foundations of parameter advising, and then cover applications and extensions of advising. The content • examines formulations of parameter advising and their computational complexity, • develops methods for learning good accuracy estimators, • presents approximation algorithms for finding good sets of parameter choices, and • assesses software implementations of advising that perform well on real biological data. Also explored are applications of parameter advising to • adaptive local realignment, where advising is performed on local regions of the sequences to automatically adapt to varying mutation rates, and • ensemble alignment, where advising is applied to an ensemble of aligners to effectively yield a new aligner of higher quality than the individual aligners in the ensemble. The book concludes by offering future directions in advising research.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21th Annual Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology, RECOMB 2017, held in Hong Kong, China, in May 2017. The 22 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 184 submissions. 16 short abstracts are included in the back matter of the volume. They report on original research in all areas of computational molecular biology and bioinformatics

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics, WABI 2016, held in Aarhus, Denmark. The 25 full papers together with 2 invited talks presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The selected papers cover a wide range of topics from networks, tophylogenetic studies, sequence and genome analysis, comparative genomics, and mass spectrometry data analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology, RECOMB 2012, held in Barcelona, Spain, in April 2012. The 31 revised full papers presented together with 5 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 200 submissions. The papers feature current research in all areas of computational molecular biology, including: molecular sequence analysis; recognition of genes and regulatory elements; molecular evolution; protein structure; structural genomics; analysis of gene expression; biological networks; sequencing and genotyping technologies; drug design; probabilistic and combinatorial algorithms; systems biology; computational proteomics; structural and functional genomics; information systems for computational biology and imaging.

Covers the fundamentals and techniques of multiple biological sequence alignment and analysis, and shows readers how to choose the appropriate sequence analysis tools for their tasks This book describes the traditional and modern approaches in biological sequence alignment and homology search. This book contains 11 chapters, with Chapter 1 providing basic information on biological sequences. Next, Chapter 2 contains fundamentals in pair-wise sequence alignment, while Chapters 3 and 4 examine popular existing quantitative models and practical clustering techniques that have been used in multiple sequence alignment. Chapter 5 describes, characterizes and relates many multiple sequence alignment models. Chapter 6 describes how traditionally phylogenetic trees have been constructed, and available sequence knowledge bases can be used to improve the accuracy of reconstructing phylogeny trees. Chapter 7 covers the latest methods developed to improve the run-time efficiency of multiple sequence alignment. Next, Chapter 8 covers several popular existing multiple sequence alignment server and services, and Chapter 9 examines several multiple sequence alignment techniques that have been developed to handle short sequences (reads) produced by the Next Generation Sequencing technique (NSG). Chapter 10 describes a Bioinformatics application using multiple sequence alignment of short reads or whole genomes as input. Lastly, Chapter 11 provides a review of RNA and protein secondary structure prediction using the evolution information inferred from multiple sequence alignments. • Covers the full spectrum of the field, from alignment algorithms to scoring methods, practical techniques, and alignment tools and their evaluations • Describes theories and developments of scoring functions and scoring matrices •Examines phylogeny estimation and large-scale homology search Multiple Biological Sequence Alignment: Scoring Functions, Algorithms and Applications is a reference for researchers, engineers, graduate and post-graduate students in bioinformatics, and system biology and molecular biologists. Ken Nguyen, PhD, is an associate professor at Clayton State University, GA, USA. He received his PhD, MSc and BSc degrees in computer science all from Georgia State University. His research interests are in databases, parallel and distribute computing and bioinformatics. He was a Molecular Basis of Disease fellow at Georgia State and is the recipient of the highest graduate honor at Georgia State, the William M. Suttles Graduate Fellowship. Xuan Guo, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate at Oak Ridge National Lab, USA. He received his PhD degree in computer science from Georgia State University in 2015. His research interests are in bioinformatics, machine leaning, and cloud computing. He is an editorial assistant of International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications. Yi Pan, PhD, is a Regents' Professor of Computer Science and an Interim Associate Dean and Chair of Biology at Georgia State University. He received his BE and ME in computer engineering from Tsinghua University in China and his PhD in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Pan's research interests include parallel and distributed computing, optical networks, wireless networks and bioinformatics. He has published more than 180 journal papers with about 60 papers published in various IEEE/ACM journals. He is co-editor along with Albert Y. Zomaya of the Wiley Series in Bioinformatics.

This two-volume set (CCIS 951 and CCIS 952) constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Bio-inspired Computing: Theories and Applications, BIC-TA 2018, held in Beijing, China, in November 2018. The 88 full papers presented in both volumes were selected from 206 submissions. The papers deal with studies abstracting computing ideas such as data structures, operations with data, ways to control operations, computing models from living phenomena or biological systems such as evolution, cells, neural networks, immune systems, swarm intelligence.

From basic performing of sequence alignment through a proficiency at understanding how most industry-standard alignment algorithms achieve their results, Multiple Sequence Alignment Methods describes numerous algorithms and their nuances in chapters written by the experts who developed these algorithms. The various multiple sequence alignment algorithms presented in this handbook give a flavor of the broad range of choices available for multiple sequence alignment generation, and their diversity is a clear reflection of the complexity of the multiple sequence alignment problem and the amount of information that can be obtained from multiple sequence alignments. Each of these chapters not only describes the algorithm it covers but also presents instructions and tips on using their implementation, as is fitting with its inclusion in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series. Authoritative and practical, Multiple Sequence Alignment Methods provides a readily available resource which will allow practitioners to experiment with different algorithms and find the particular algorithm that is of most use in their application.

The sequencing of the human genome involved thousands of scientists but used relatively few tools. Obtaining sequences is simpler, but aligning the sequences remains a complicated but underappreciated aspect of comparative molecular biology. This book discusses the practice of alignment, and the procedures by which alignments are established.